In software engineering, there are many problems that are just too large for a single developer to tackle in any timely fashion and require multiple software developers to work in tandem. However, this can lead to many problems. For example, how does one ensure that they are working on the latest version of the project or that one's changes are not overwritten by another developer's modifications? These problems are magnified as more and more developers are added to the project, yet large projects with many programmers are common and run successfully without these problems. So how do they do this? The answer is that they use configuration management tools like Subversion. Here I shall share my initial experiences in using the Subversion configuration management tool and the Google Project Hosting website to host my CrazyTracker robot.
Subversion and Google Project Hosting
So we want to collaborate with others on this CrazyTracker robot, but how do we do it? First off, we need to get the tools required for Subversion. There are two main components of Subversion: a client program to communicate with the source code repository and a server to host said repository. I use a Windows operating system so I chose to use the TortoiseSVN client which allows the user to right click a folder and choose various commands from the pop up window. As for the server, we can easily create one by making a new project in Google Project Hosting. Once those are set up, it is just a simple matter of checking out the empty source directory of our new project, adding the CrazyTracker project's files in TortoiseSVN, and committing the changes to upload the the project to the Google Project Hosting server.
Now that the code is up there, we have to add some documentation in the form of wiki pages (i.e. user / developer guides) and add some "committers" to work on the project. Once that is completed, anyone can see the source code and anyone with committer permissions can upload their changes to the repository using Subversion.
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| Some of the commands available through the TortoiseSVN user interface. Includes the "Blame" command which shows the last person that modified each line. |
Conclusion
Overall, setting up the robocode-fch-crazytracker project on Google Project Hosting was relatively quick, easy, and painless. TortoiseSVN installed with no problems on my Windows computer and Google's simple and intuitive interface made creating the project and its documentation quite painless. If anything, the only gripes I had about the whole process was the fact that I had to check out the empty project to upload the original source files (why can't we add source files when creating the project?) and that the wiki markup language assumes that words with capital letters are links to other wiki pages and puts a "?" link after them. As a result, I had to put a "!" before those words to make those links go away which was a simple fix, but it did get annoying after a while. However, my first experience with Subversion and Google Project Hosting was definitely a good one and I can see how such tools can help with collaboration. Subversion in particular has some very interesting features (for instance, it can tell you who changed which lines of code with the blame function!) and I am definitely looking forward to using these tools for my future group projects. Now that you have seen just how easy it is to set up the tools needed to make group work that much less painful, let's get collaborating!
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